Autism, Dyslexia, and Adding Expression Changes to a Visual Novel

(I want to start by acknowledging that I’ve been inactive for years at this point. I lost the energy to do everything I wanted to for a long time while I was working retail. I have more free time now, and have actually done a lot with my time over the past half year.)

I’m writing this to help myself process the factors that are hindering my progress with something I want to do, and hopefully some of my thoughts can help anyone with similar roadblocks.

Over the past 6 months I’ve been working entirely by myself on a Visual Novel as a way to fill my time while staying unemployed in an isolated environment. For the most part I’ve enjoyed the challenge of managing a diversity of tasks that all feed into the one big project, writing, coding, drawing, planning, character designing, managing a complex branching structure of player choices. It’s all been something I enjoy doing enough that even the hard tasks are something I can still initiate. 

However, I finally got to the task of drawing alternate expressions for the characters and inserting them into the dialogue in appropriate places. This task has been destroying my resolve to do at least a little work on the game 5+ days a week. Since beginning this 9 days ago, I did one day of art, two days of adding them into the dialogue (but ended earlier in the day than usual), another half day of art, and that’s it. 

These past two days I have tried and failed to initiate the task of actually reading my dialogue, and adding in the appropriate facial expression for the entirety of a character’s dialogue. I also failed to do it today too, but I hope that in writing this, I can resolve some of what’s stopping me from it. 

The most significant factor is, I believe because, I’m dyslexic and reading is tiring. I read best when I can lose track of the experience of reading, and instead get absorbed into the projected mental/sensory experience of the content of what I’m reading. This task runs entirely in contrast to that state. For this I need to stop every several lines to assess if I need to have the character change expression and if so, to which of my drawn expressions. 

Another relevant factor is simply that this is a task of assessing what facial expressions and body language would fit a character. I need to use a lot of mental energy to assess not just what I should expect the character to do, but also then imagine how other people might understand the change in facial expression. This all being mental processes I need to actively invoke each time.

I also have the limitation that I have a set of defined images I drew for this, and there’s not always one that fits the expression I think I need. So in some cases I take the time to make a new variant of the closest one. In other cases, nothing seems close at all, and I might not even know what I actually want. At that point it turns into a game of trying out each existing expression and settling on the one that seems the least discordant with the dialogue.

My default state of being has my affect flat and I’m not the least bit bothered by that. So writing these characters for many months, and seeing them each with one static sprite to represent them all this time never seemed unnatural to me. It feels like now I’m trying to give them life in a way that I don’t myself express. This really is a valuable thing for me to do. While I tried to make the expression ane meaning in the writing as unambiguous as possible, having another tool to show what my character are expression is great for reinforcing and supporting those meanings. It’s just so much harder to implement than I expected.

One bright side to all of this is that I’m absolutely sure this would be so much harder if my characters had human faces. Instead they’re all basically cats, which gives me the feeling of more leeway with getting the expressions ‘right’ or close enough.

In writing this, I don’t feel like I thought of any new strategy to make it easier, but hopefully I’ve increased my motivation to put up with how tiring it is so I can just get this all done and move on to more fun tasks in this project. I’m also open to hearing any ideas anyone else has to make it an easier task for me to do.